In an ideal world, everybody would have a perfect Internet connection and we could watch streaming web videos without any glitch on any gadget. But we’re not living in the ideal world, and there are many of us who have to spend ten minutes (or more) just to watch a one minute video.

A slow Internet connection is one of the reasons why people prefer to watch downloaded web videos instead of streaming the content to their device. Other possible reasons include playing the web videos on non streaming-capable mobile devices and burning the videos to CD/DVD and playing them on TV. With so many video sites on the web today, we can never get enough of web video downloaders. Meet Clip Converter. This tool is no ordinary web video downloader, because it also allows users to clip and convert web videos before downloading them.

Just Add The URLs

If you want to use Clip Converter only to download a web video, all you need is the video URL. Clip Converter supports many web video services like YouTube, Vimeo, Metacafe, and direct download video links. You can also upload videos from your hard drive to be converted if you want to.

You can copy and paste the URL of the webpage where the video is located, even though the address doesn’t have a multimedia extension. Clip Converter will detect the media file on the page.

But the power of ClipConverter lies in its ability to convert web videos to the format that you want or need, including audio only. Here are the supported media formats:

audio: MP3, AAC, WMA, M4A, OGG

video: MP4,3GP, AVI, MPG, WMV, FLV

When you choose one of the formats before continuing with the download process, Clip Converter will display customization options related to that format. So for example, when I chose MP4, Clip Converter let me adjust the audio volume, audio channels, audio and video bitrate, and video aspect ratio.

Another great feature of Clip Converter is the ability to clip web videos. You can choose whether or not you want to download the full video (by checking the “Start of Video” and “End of Video” boxes) or only a specific part of it (by unchecking the boxes and typing in the start and end times).

After you click the “Continue” button, Clip Converter will analyze the page and show you the detected media. If the video is available in more than one quality and/or format, you can choose which one you want to get. One video might have three options: standard quality in FLV, high quality in MP4, and High Definition in MP4; while other videos might have only two.

After clicking the “Start” button, you will see the progress bars. In my experiments, I found the whole process to be lightning fast.

Next is the result page. Aside from the obvious download button, you will also find other related information about the converted video, including a QR code that can be scanned with a QR-enabled smartphone.

Taking A Shortcut

If you do a lot of web video downloading and converting, repeatedly copying and pasting video URLs is impractical. Everything would be much easier and faster if you could do the process straight from the video sites.

There are two ways to do that. ClipConverter provides users with browser add-ons and extensions (available for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari), and bookmarklets (for other browsers, or as a complimentary tool to the add-on).

With the add-on enabled, you’ll have an additional Clip Converter button on the video sites. Clicking on it will bring you to the Clip Converter site to continue with the process. The same thing will happen if you click the bookmarklet button when you are viewing a video page.

As a person who loves web videos, I found Clip Converter to be very useful. What about you? Have you tried it? Or do you know and use other similar services? Please share them using the comments below.

I use firefox addon - downloadhelper to download videos off the web.It supports many websites.It also has video conversion option and privacy option to download videos secretly.It also has integration support for the famous download manager for firefox - Downthemall!-i.e. whatever video downloadhelper catches it will be able to download it using Downthemall!

I prefer to use online video ripper, at first, I just supposed it to be a
download helper to help me rip videos from websites. But now it has been a
video manager for me, I can convert videos with it to view them on my cell
phone and sort out downloaded videos in its category. If I have no enough time,
I can resume the downloading tasks next time when I run it.